Fox's Katie Pavlich Smears Clinton With Benghazi Lie

Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich smeared Hillary Clinton by claiming that she lied in a speech honoring the victims of the September 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya. But Pavlich is distorting Clinton's remarks.

Fox & Friends covered the announcement that NBC's entertainment division is planning to air a new mini-series focused on Hillary Clinton's "life as a wife, mother, politician and cabinet member" sometime before 2015. Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich used the segment as an opportunity to smear Clinton, saying:

PAVLICH: Although Diane Lane is a fantastic actress, I doubt she can act as well as Hillary Clinton did when she lied about that YouTube video in front of flag-draped caskets of Americans as they came home from being killed in Benghazi. So it's going to be really hard for her to top that performance.

But in her remarks, Clinton mentioned the wave of protests at U.S. embassies in the region, which repeated news reports said were in response to an anti-Islam video that was posted on YouTube. From Clinton's remarks [emphasis added]:

In the days since the attack, so many Libyans - including the Ambassador from Libya to the United States, who is with us today - have expressed their sorrow and solidarity. One young woman, her head covered and her eyes haunted with sadness, held up a handwritten sign that said "Thugs and killers don't represent Benghazi nor Islam." The President of the Palestinian Authority, who worked closely with Chris when he served in Jerusalem, sent me a letter remembering his energy and integrity, and deploring - and I quote - "an act of ugly terror." Many others from across the Middle East and North Africa have offered similar sentiments.

This has been a difficult week for the State Department and for our country. We've seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We've seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with. It is hard for the American people to make sense of that because it is senseless, and it is totally unacceptable.

Pavlich's description of Clinton's "performance" is a reference to is the administration's early contention that an anti-Muslim YouTube video played a role in sparking the Benghazi attacks, which Fox has long attacked as a "lie" and some sort of cover-up. But unclassified talking points produced by the intelligence community linked the video to the Benghazi attack, and The New York Timesreported that the Benghazi attackers "did tell bystanders that they were attacking the compound because they were angry about the video."

Right-wing media are up in arms over the Department of Defense's (DOD) release of a 1987 report suggesting Israel has nuclear capabilities, claiming the acknowledgement of the country's nuclear program is an "unprecedented" "leak" and act of "treachery" from the White House. In reality, the Bush administration declassified information on Israel's nuclear program years ago, and the DOD only released the 1987 report after years of fighting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.